Archive for October, 2015

I’m putting some notes together for a talk at the forthcoming Historical Materialism conference London. I’ll be speaking about Andre Gorz, Nicos Poulantzas and the question of structural reform. I plan to use this blog to post work in progress notes and drafts as I prepare the talk. I came across the following paras which were cut from a recent article about Corbyn which pretty much sum up the argument I intend to make.

It’s important to pick up on some of the wider political and strategic lessons of the current conjuncture. As we have seen, the Corbyn phenomenon is part of a broader political shift across Europe. Despite their many differences one of the key perspectives shared in common among the leftist formations that have made political headway recently – Syriza, Podemos, the Corbyn movement – is an explicit orientation on winning government power in order to implement a series of left social democratic reforms. Political formations cleaving to classical revolutionary Marxist perspectives have nowhere made any comparable advances. The clear organic dynamic of contemporary radicalization across Europe then is toward the formation of ‘left governments’ of radical reform. Like it or not we have to work with the grain of this dynamic. We’ve seen some of the inherent pitfalls and problems of this approach of course in the case of the Syriza government and the brick wall it ran into from day one. Of course we need to learn lessons from this but these can’t be to fall back on facile invocations of revolutionary slogans such as to call for the ‘smashing of the state’ (whatever that means concretely) – concepts which offer resolutions to real problems at the level of phraseology only and which, in any case, are plainly unsuccessful in winning very many people over.

Working with the grain of this contemporary political dynamic means thinking seriously about the possibilities and limits of radical ‘transitional programs’ and ‘structural reforms’ and about how a government of the left in dialectical interaction with an extra-parliamentary mass movement might be able to enact such measures in such a way that the movement from below is progressively empowered. Erik Olin Wright’s recent attempt to think through a way of combining what he calls the ‘three strategic logics of transformation’ – ‘symbiotic’, ‘interstitial’ and ‘ruptural’ – provides useful ideas in this regard. But we also need to re-examine André Gorz’s thought on ‘non reformist reforms’ and to return to some of the resources of (left) Eurocommunism which seem, to me, to have acquired a renewed relevance.